1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates, generally, to a telephone system that helps users of travel cards control their costs and limit their losses. More particularly, it relates to a system whereby the travel card customer can control use of the travel cards without relying upon the issuer of the cards.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A real time telephone system having utility in reducing losses due to travel card fraud was first introduced in 1990 by the present inventor; that system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,068,891.
The essence of that breakthrough invention was its capture of data at a point between the DCO switching equipment of the telephone system and the internal buffer that temporarily stores data downloaded from said DCO switching equipment. However, in that earlier system, the data is downloaded and captured at the conclusion of a call.
Thus, the patented system interfaced with the DCO switch, but could not interact with it during a call. Thus, if a travel card user expended all of his or her travel card credit during a call, no means was provided where the call could be terminated while it was still in progress. An overseas call of several hours duration, for example, could result in losses to the card issuer or the customer of the issuer (depending upon which part absorbed the loss).
The earlier patent was a pioneering patent because it disclosed the first real time means for limiting travel card fraud by enabling the card customer to deactivate a PIN associated with any travel card anytime during the month when the credit balance on that card was exhausted. Before the disclosure of the patent, travel card customers were required to wait until the end of a monthly billing cycle before abuses could be detected; thus, an entire month of abuses could occur before such abuses were detected and stopped.
It should be understood, then, that the patented system was a system that interfaced with the DCO switch of an existing phone system, thereby eliminating the need to wait for the end of a billing cycle, but it was not a system that interacted with the DCO switch during a call.
What is needed, then, is an interactive system so that calls may be terminated, if desired, at the front end of or during progress of the call. A system accessible by those who use cellular telephones is also needed. Moreover, there is a need for a system equipped with a voice response means to increase the versatility of the system. A need also exists for creative techniques for checking the validity of PINs.
However, the prior art, when considered as a whole at the time the present invention was made, neither taught nor suggest that these features would be desirable nor points the way to a system capable of providing them.